Heavy Lies the Grasshopper
by Fredosphere
Summary: A member of the resistance disobeys orders by watching a newsreel and bitterly regrets it.
1. Forward

God I hope I think of everything. I don't know who you are or how you found this but I'll try to put down everything important. Everything you'll need to know to—do whatever.

I have no idea what the hell is going on!

When my contact gave me the film he told me not to watch it. He always says that, every film. That's what he does: he gives me a film and a drop location. My job is to transport it. I think the ultimate destination of these films is some place in the Neutral Zone, but I've never been trusted that far; I only travel within the Greater Nazi Reich.

Always I do what I'm told, but this time, something about the way my contact spoke, the emphasis when he said "don't watch the film!" got to me. So of course, I watched it. O God I wished I hadn't watched it.

My drop was in Old Georgetown, the neighborhood of Washington. I could see why they picked the place; Nazis avoid the area even to this day, but lowlifes don't mind the risk of radiation.

My drop was a pawn shop on Wisconsin Avenue but I drove my DeSoto down to M Street. I found what I was looking for: there, among the boarded up storefronts, an abandoned movie theater. (If you found this message then I guess you already know.) I made sure no one was watching as I tucked the film under my coat. The main entrance was unlocked.

The place had red velvet everywhere with gold metal trim, very ornate, but gone to seed. The posters on the wall were a time capsule of U.S. cinema before everything went to hell: The Outlaw, Lassie Come Home, shows like that. There were movie tickets on the floor. The place had been abandoned in a panic and nobody every came back to clean up.

The popcorn bin was empty. Rats had broken it open and feasted upon its contents, leaving behind some turds. Behind the counter I heard an odd little scraping sound. There was an rancid tub of shortening there and a black rat had recently got the lid off. The greedy thing had jumped in there, stuffed himself, then found he couldn't climb out of the slippery hole. He looked exhausted but he would not stop churning the yellow slime with his claws. I laughed myself silly as I watched him struggle. I kind of liked knowing there was something more hopeless than me.

Fact is, I'm a mess. I can't hold down a job. I taught at a university years ago, and then a couple of high schools, but always I crack and get fired. I get by, barely, as a tutor of rich kids. I can't concentrate because of what I saw in the war and because of what they did to Joyce, my fiance, afterwards.

I went into the theater. The place was huge, with a big gilded arch over the stage. It must have been quite something in its day. I found the door to the projection booth, up behind the last row of seats in the balcony.

I opened the canister. The other films had been labeled "The Grasshopper Lies Heavy" but this one was called "Heavy Lies the Grasshopper." It also said "Do not rewind!" I wish I had paid more attention to those hints. How was I to know? God, I wished I had paid attention.

I fed the movie into the projector and turned it on. The picture was big as a football field. It was not what I expected at all. I was sure of one thing: this was no Hollywood production. The details looked real, more than real. Another uncanny thing was the camera motion, which seemed off somehow. It was like I was watching a documentary from another world. The lack of sound only made it stranger.

The movie showed a destroyed city. I figured out real quick it wasn't Washington. Some buildings still stood but others had been flattened. This devastation was the work of many small bombs, not one Überbomb.

I saw a structure I recognized. You see it in newsreels of Hitler's triumphs: the Brandenburg gate. This was Berlin. This was what Berlin would look like, if the Nazis had lost the war.

Like I said, this was no Hollywood back lot. It all looked as true as any newsreel.

I saw a human figure, just a small dark dot, picking through the wreckage. It moved with inhuman back-steps and I got why the film seemed so strange: it was playing backwards. Then I remembered the writing on the canister and I knew it was not an accident.

The camera moved on. The camera was hand-held and the blocks of smoking ruins slowly receded as minutes passed. The cameraman pivoted at a right angle and reversed into a doorway. We were inside the lobby of an intact building. I was given a glimpse of the walls and I saw movie posters, all in German. We were inside a Berlin movie theater.

The camera swung back to the entrance and a man silhouetted in the bright outdoor light came in backwards. He wore the uniform of an officer in the U.S. army, a colonel I think.

He stopped and pivoted as he drew out his gun. (Really, he was holstering it, but backwards—you know.) From the direction he turned, I couldn't see his face, although he seemed familiar. He never looked at the camera. It was like he didn't know it was there.

The camera followed the aim of the gun. A man lay on the floor. A shrinking pool of blood surrounded his head. The camera moved in on his face. It was a bloody mess.

The camera skittered back. Quick as a wink, the blood was sucked up like his head were a vacuum cleaner. The body jerked up and rose to its feet like a marienette's puppet would, ending with a flash from the pistol. It would have been funny if I wasn't convinced I had just seen a real murder.

There was another reason I wasn't laughing. I could see the man's face clearly now. I had to stop the film to be sure. The man was dressed in the shabby clothes of a German worker, but there was no mistake. I knew him well, although we sure as hell weren't what you would call friends. The man was Obergruppenführer John Smith.


	2. Backward

I had what you would call a history with Obergruppenführer John Smith. He had betrayed the USA and the Nazis had rewarded him with a top position in the SS of the Greater Nazi Reich.

A nobody like me would normally not have any contact with someone so important, but I had one skill the Obergruppenführer found useful: I was a good math tutor.

You see, the Obergruppenführer had a son, Thomas, whom he was grooming for a top position in government. The problem was that the kid was a dunce at math. He was flunking algebra and the Obergruppenführer wasn't going to allow that to happen.

He also wasn't going to pull strings to get the kid a grade he hadn't earned. I guess I'll have to give him credit for that. A Nazi with a code of honor: figure that out if you can.

The mighty Obergruppenführer heard of my reputation as a math exam coach. Smith sent one of his underlings to hire me. Over the next months I went to his home many times, and even glimpsed him on occasion. Understand, I was not a house guest. A bum like me, even an egghead bum, was never welcome. Plus he didn't want the neighbors to know his kid was struggling academically. I came and went via the back gate before dawn. The garden house was my makeshift school room.

Soon after I started teaching Thomas, I noticed a guy showing up at the Greek diner where I always ate my dinner. He went out of his way to be friendly to me. Before I knew it, we were trading illegal rumors in a booth in the back over watery chicken lemon rice soup. I have to admit, he was a real artist at what he did, which was recruiting revolutionaries. If you held a gun to my head, I wouldn't be able to tell you the exact moment I figured out who he was or what he was asking me to join. Somehow, the conversation just naturally would turn to our hatred of Nazis and I would brag about what close access I had to powerful people. Eventually it became clear Bill—of course that wasn't his real name—was asking me to take on an espionage assignment. I backed off real quick. To be honest, the Obergruppenführer terrified me.

I called Smith's kid a dunce, but he was earnest and I grew fond of him. The fact is, the kid was kindhearted and almost painfully respectful to me. He noticed how thin I was and he would steal leftovers for me from the icebox whenever he could. It was the best food I had eaten in years. That a decent kid like that would be born into a family of fascist snakes made me sick.

Of course, it didn't last. The gods who love to crush decent people made sure of that. I showed up one Monday morning at the garden house but Thomas never came out. Later, I called Smith's office and some secretary told me I was fired. The kid had gone on a hunting trip with his dad and had accidentally got shot.

Let me tell you something about Nazis and their "hunting accidents". That's the way they take care of one of their own who has been insubordinate. I knew the Obergruppenführer was capable of any evil, so I wasn't completely surprised. What infuriated me was that I had turned the kid around. I'm sure he could have passed his exam.

Maybe the kid screwed up in some other way. Maybe he stole a pencil from his father's desk. Maybe he drew horns on a picture of Der Fuhrer. Whatever it was, his own father slaughtered him like a sheep and the whole thing made me sick.

This was the monster, Obergruppenführer whom I had just seen in the movie I was watching. He was getting his face blown off in backwards time and I admit I was thrilled.

After I had heard about Smith's son, I went back to the diner and let Bill know I was ready to do his dirty work.

I told him I was ready to assassinate the Obergruppenführer. I dreamed of sneaking into his bedroom and stabbing him in the throat while his perfect china doll of a wife looked on helplessly.

Instead, Bill made me a courier. At first it was bicycle trips around Manhattan. When they decided they could trust me, they got me an old DeSoto for trips out of town.

People don't realize how boring spy work is. They never tell you anything. You never hear of buildings blowing up or important people getting assassinated. So I got impatient. Against explicit orders, I got in the habit of picking apart the wrapping of the packages. (I was good at it. I was like a kid with presents before Christmas.)

They were movies. Just movies. I couldn't believe it. I would unspool a few feet of film in the hopes of figuring out what they were about, but it was always just scenes of ordinary stuff.

I wondered what movies could possibly have to do with a plot to overthrow the government. Were they propaganda? Were they blackmail pictures of Nazis in whorehouses or something? Were they porno films that had the power to make Nazis go blind? Every idea I came up with seemed crazy. It ate at me, not knowing.

So here I was, in an abandoned theater in Georgetown. And I was finding out the movie was like nothing I could have guessed.

I started the film again. My mind was still buzzing from seeing Obergruppenführer Smith as a bum in Berlin, but I was desperate for more information.

Smith was still standing in a lobby, with an enraged look on his face, with the door to the theater behind him. A hand reached toward him, the hand of the colonel I had seen before. It was holding a movie canister. I couldn't believe it. It looked just like the ones I had been smuggling. It even had the same kind of label on the edge. Too bad I couldn't read the title. Smith took the movie and tucked it under his coat. Then he held up his hands and I saw him talk for a couple of minutes, as if the colonel was asking him questions and he was answering. I wish I knew what they said, but I wouldn't have understood the backwards talk even if I could have heard it.

The conversation ended (or I guess I should say, it began) and the camera moved toward Smith. He had a look on his face that was so strange, like he was surprised but not surprised at what he was seeing. It was like the Colonel was someone he had been expecting, but he still couldn't believe it.

The cameraman moved past Smith and pivoted 180 degrees. At that moment I got my first good look at the face of the U.S. army colonel. For a second time, I had to stop the film to be sure of what I was seeing.

There was no doubt. The face I was staring at was my own.


	3. Double Reverse

The cameraman walked backwards through the door to the theater. The colonel who looked just like me shrank from view. I saw the hand of the cameraman catch the door as it closed. It swung again to admit Obergruppenführer Smith as he in turn walked backwards into the theater. The door swung to meet his hand and as it closed, he paused. He stood there, literally trembling, his upraised hand curling into a fist, as if he expected the bullet waiting for him on the other side of the door. And here I had always seen him as the exemplar of Nazi coldness.

The cameraman led Smith up the stairs in reverse motion all the way to the projection booth. The canister came out of Smith's filthy coat and he loaded the film onto the back of the projector. I expected him to start the projector (or really stop it, but you know) but he didn't. Cameraman and Obergruppenführer backstepped their way into the theater again. The camera paused and watched Smith draw out a pad of paper and a pen from under a seat. He sat and began writing.

He wrote—or I should say, unwrote—several pages. The camera moved in close and I watched the lines of ink lift off the page as the pen moved over them. I could see it well enough to see it was German, a language that, even now, I refuse to learn.

The cameraman was patient. Obergruppenführer spent many long minutes unwriting. I waited, convinced that I needed to watch the whole thing.

When Smith was done unwriting, he stood and examined the objects he was holding. The curious camera went in close. The pen was a fancy fountain pen with an American flag inlaid in polished metal of gold or silver. (I wasn't sure which, since the film was in black and white.)

Obergruppenführer Smith replaced the paper and pen under the seat, then fished around with his hands, searching for the objects. He went to each of the emergency exits and pounded on the doors, but could not open them. Then he walked back to the projection booth and started the movie. The rear reel began spinning and the film shot out to thread itself backwards through the projector.

The camera focused on Obergruppenführer Smith's face. All along it had been hardened and angry. Now it took on a look of confusion, even amazement. The fickle, flickering light from the movie screen cast shadows on a face that could not believe what it was seeing.

The camera rotated to show the screen. No doubt the expression on my face matched that of the poor Obergruppenführer.

From my point of view the film was playing forwards. That is, it was double-reversed. Obergruppenführer Smith was watching a film play backwards, just as I was. He was in an abandoned theater in a devastated Berlin watching a film play backwards even as I was in an abandoned theater in the outskirts of Washington watching a film play backwards. The meaning of the warning, "don't watch this movie!" came back to me.

How I wish I had heeded that warning!

The film showed a man walking down the main street of an abandoned town. The buildings looked all too familiar: Georgetown. The camera followed the man, who was dressed exactly like me. It caught up to him as he went through the main entrance of an abandoned theater. He looked around to confirm no one was watching him. He seemed not to notice the cameraman following him. I got a good look at his face. He was the person I was expecting. Damn this movie! Damn it to Hell!

The cameraman kept his camera on the screen in that other theater in bombed-out Berlin and the movie within a movie kept playing. I watched myself on the screen explore the lobby and walk past the poster of Lassie Come Home and inspect the empty popcorn hopper. I saw myself laugh at the trapped rat in the tub of shortening.

The trapped rat!

I felt vomit rise up in my throat. I couldn't watch any more. I hardly needed to. I ran from the projection booth. Paranoia overcame me as I spun in circles, looking everywhere for a cameraman filming my every move. (Would I felt less insane had I found him?) I felt a sense of claustrophobia even in that cavernous space. I went to the emergency exits, down on either side of the screen, but they were bolted shut. I banged on the doors but it was useless. I was in a trap with only one way out.

I ran about the huge space, hunting through the seats, looking for the paper and pen. I found them in the obvious place: section 6, row 6, seat 6.

They were just as they appeared in the movie, except this pen had a gold swastika inlay. I unscrewed the cap and began writing the words you are reading right now.

I don't know who you are or whose side you're on or whether reading this will do you any good. Can knowing what I tell you help you escape your fate? Are you Obergruppenführer Smith? Are you me, from another world? Does it matter? Are you just another rat caught in a trap?

I'm going out to the lobby now. I'm not going there to be shot in the face by Obergruppenführer Smith. That's not the way this ends. That's what I'm telling myself. I'm going to the lobby to rescue the rat trapped in the shortening. I'm going to kick that tub over and set that rat free. He doesn't have to die like that. He doesn't deserve to die like that! Even a rat doesn't deserve to die like that!


End file.
